Vox Day
I just had a conversation with the devil.
Well, from what people have been posting, he seemed like the devil. But I know how the internet can be. Mitt Romney at one time was the devil. Now, I think he’s been degraded in those quarters to janitor of the hot place. Yeah, that one Romney who is out raising tons of money to help fix blindness among the poorest of the poor, that evil son-of-a-gun.
So when I saw there was a new head honcho in town, I decided to see what he was all about.
I did try reading various posts on the internet, but after a dozen or so of those, I realized it would just be easier to go to the source. And so I went to Vox Day’s website and clicked the contact link, which popped up an email.
I asked Day if he’d mind answering a few questions.
He agreed.
What you will read below is our conversation, arranged for easy reading.
Why am I doing this?
Well, who doesn’t want to scoop the devil? But beyond that, I agree with George R. R. Martin: internet conversations that are not moderated to maintain a tone of respectful disagreement are a bane upon us all. Actually, Martin said they were part of the devil’s alimentary canal, but I didn’t want to confuse the topic.
So I’d read a number of posts that Day had made and others folks had made about Day and saw all the bad juju going back and forth. And I wanted to know what this guy actually believed. Once I understood that, if I disagreed, then I could disagree in a way that I think is actually productive.
We talked about some of his views on two subjects—race and women. Are his ideas provocative? Well, you need to know what they are before you decide.
Conversation
Brown
Vox,
I’m following the conversation about the Hugos. Many of the conversations claim you are a racist and misogynist. Knowing how labels and slurs can magically become fact, I wanted to go to the source and understand what it is you truly believe. I’ve done some reading on your site. I’ve seen attack pieces such as this http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Theodore_Beale#cite_note-real-ass-13.
But it’s all so scattershot and snippets out of context. I’m wondering if you might answer some questions. If so, my first questions are about your views on race.
- Do you believe Black Africans have, in general, less genetic potential for intelligence than White Europeans?
- Do you believe the same for the darker Asians like those from India or Indonesia?
- Which genetic group has the highest genetic potential for intelligence at this time?
- You mention three genetic groups here http://voxday.blogspot.com/2014/01/more-highly-evolved.html. Are you talking about Europe/Asia, Africa, the Americas?
Day
Hi John,
My response to those who claim I am racist or misogynist is simple: why do you reject science, history, and logic? It is not hateful to be scientifically literate, historically aware, and logically correct.
- Pure Homo sapiens sapiens lack Homo neanderthalus and Homo denisova genes which appear to have modestly increased the base genetic potential for intelligence. These genetic differences may explain the observed IQ gap between various human population groups as well as various differences in average brain weights and skull sizes.
- Yes, East Asians have been observed to have considerably higher IQs than Southeast Asians.
- The Chinese. Their average IQ is higher than the Ashkenazi Jews, who are genetically a refined group of Semitic-Italian crosses. To be more specific, the highest average IQ is found in Singapore.
- No, the genetic groups are the Homo sapiens sapiens/Homo neanderthalus crosses, the Homo sapiens sapiens/Homo neanderthalus/Homo denisova crosses, and the pure Homo sapiens sapiens. These broadly align with Europe, Asia, and Africa, but not exactly.
You may find this to be a useful reference on the intelligence front: https://lesacreduprintemps19.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/intelligence-a-unifying-construct-for-the-social-sciences-richard-lynn-and-tatu-vanhanen.pdf
Brown
Let me see if I’ve captured your overall approach. You feel it’s important to examine and conduct science without regard to political correctness. For example, if Vanhanen and Lynn say IQ is genetic, you feel the most appropriate thing to do is not attack them for being racists, but simply examine their data and conclusions dispassionately. It’s important to question it. Argue with it. Try to falsify, as we do with any other scientific claim. But not dismiss it simply on the basis that it doesn’t agree with our what we feel is morally right. Correct?
Day
Yes. Science and history and logic exist regardless of whether we are happy about them or not. We have to take them into account.
Brown
It appears the Lynn & Vanhanen book suggests the genetic IQ differences were caused, not by Homo crosses, but by natural selection operating in colder climates over long periods of time. Can you provide another reference that discusses the DNA tracing and IQ correlation of the various crosses?
Day
There are many articles on the Internet about DNA and IQ, I suggest you simply search them out and read a few. The data is conclusive, the rationale explaining the data is not.
Brown
I’m not sure I understand what you mean when you said the rationale explaining the data is not conclusive. What do you mean by that?
Day
Regarding rationale, the data is beyond dispute. But we cannot explain why the data is the way that it is, we can only construct various explanatory hypotheses. Historical explanations are, for the most part, scientific fairy tales, literal science fiction.
Brown
I read your comment to Jemisin about African exposure to Greco-Roman culture. It seems you’re suggesting societies can’t make large change their culture (values and beliefs) over a few generations, or within one generation. Is that what you’re claiming? It doesn’t seem like you’re making a genetic-intelligence argument since 1,000-2,000 years seems too short for any type of significant evolution. Of course, if it’s a cultural argument, then I don’t see how it’s possible to say it’s impossible for a bunch of Jemisons to accomplish this since she was raised with the Western culture. Confused on your base point here.
Day
Yes, I am claiming that societies are incapable of moving from full primitivism to full civilization within the time frame that primitive African societies have been in contact with what we consider to be civilization. It is a genetic argument. It takes that long to kill off or otherwise suppress the breeding of the excessively violent and short-time preferenced. African-American men are 500 times more likely to possess a gene variant that is linked to violence and aggression than white American men.
Brown
Two more questions. It doesn’t sound like you’re against immigration per se. You just think that if a society wants to continue, they need to breed. Right?
Day
I am against large-scale immigration, particularly population-replacement immigration. Limited immigration, no problem.
Brown
I suspect someone is going to wonder if your ideas on race and IQ and violence mean you favor some type of eugenics program. So let me ask you: do you believe in selective breeding or sterilization? If so, would that be to promote the Homo crosses you think are better? Or just any trait from any group you think is superior?
Day
No, I am not a eugenicist. I oppose forced selective breeding and sterilization. However, I also oppose dysgenic and dyscivic social policies, which is presently what we have across most of the West.
Brown
As much as I want to ask more about what you consider dysgenic and dyscivic policies, I think it would just lead to another topic, which would lead to another. Let’s talk about your views on women. Here are my initial questions.
- Do you believe a country is better off when women cannot vote?
- Do you believe a country is better off when women are not afforded equal education opportunities as men?
- What are the top topics of education do you think would be beneficial for women?
- I’ve read this post http://voxday.blogspot.ca/2012/06/scientist-beats-up-pz.html. It sounds like you think the main objective of a country or culture with regards to women should be to reduce female promiscuity (not necessarily male promiscuity) and increase the number of children each female bears. Is that correct?
- Referring to that same post, are you saying that genital mutilation and acid burnings are legitimate ways to treat women? Or are you saying that they are bad things, but that the societies that do such things have lower female promiscuity rates and higher fertility rates, and so it’s a small price to pay?
Day
- Yes, in a representative democracy. However, note that I favor universal direct democracy and the jury is out there.
- It depends. It increasingly appears that a society is improved by widespread female education through high school, and harmed by it beyond that level. If you look at the demographics, a society that sends its women to college stops breeding. How this is supposed to benefit a society, I do not understand.
- Again, it depends. If a society is demographically dying, then yes, it had better do something to get its birth rate up or it will cease to exist. This isn’t rocket science. If a society is stable or growing demographically, it has no need to concern itself with such policies.
- You appear to have misread the post. PZ Myers claimed that there was no rational case to be made for the Taliban’s activities. I responded by demonstrating that the Taliban’s behavior is entirely rational, it is merely the consequence of different objectives and ruthlessness in pursuing them. But the mere fact that I am capable of observing a logical syllogism does not mean I share the assumptions involved or advocate the conclusion. Considering that the Taliban defeated the Soviets and appear to have outlasted NATO, I think it is remarkably stupid to dismiss them as irrational simply because they are willing to defend their way of life.
Brown
Even though it appears I misread the exchange with PZ Myers, your answers to 2 and 3 suggest you prioritize fertility rates as the main goal a society should have towards women. As long as the population is stable or growing, you feel a society can examine other goals or objectives. But only if those goals or policies do not negatively impact the population rate. Correct?
Day
Yes. The NATIVE population rate. Immigration is used to cover up demographic decline, but it changes the nation.
Brown
Okay, what’s the reason you feel women shouldn’t vote in a representative democracy? And do you think only certain types of males should vote?
Day
The reason women shouldn’t vote in a representative democracy is they are significantly inclined to vote for whomever they would rather f***. Hence the studies about height and hair being relevant to US presidential politics. That’s why women’s suffrage was pushed by the Communists and why it is the first plank of the Fascist Manifesto.
In a representative system, yes, only certain types of males should vote. And before you leap to any silly conclusions, please keep in mind that I have lived most of my life in political systems where I am not allowed to vote. Voting does not equal maximizing freedom and liberty.
Brown
First, what types of males do you think should vote in a representative government and what’s the main reason why?
Second, do you believe large numbers of males will vote based on sexual attractiveness as well when females are running for office?
Day
Men who demonstrate sufficient long-term orientation and a willingness to put the national interest above self-interest.
No, men aren’t wired the same way.
Brown
How would you identify the types of men you mention? Military or law enforcement service? How would you determine who had a long-term view of things?
Day
I have never given any thought to how such men would be identified. Every method is bound to fail in time.
Personally, I’d like to see direct democracy tried. We now have the technology, and it would be MUCH harder to corrupt than representative democracy. At least we don’t know exactly HOW it would fail.
Brown
Vox,
This has been really helpful to me. I think it would be helpful to others wanting to understand you. Agreeing, of course, is a different matter. But that’s a different subject. Would you be okay with me posting this conversation on my site?
Day
Sure, do as you see fit. The usual suspects will have their own hissy fits, but that’s of no concern to me. I find it amusing when people tell me they disagree with some of these things. Do they not understand that it is not me with whom they are disagreeing, but reality? Why people can understand that if pandas don’t breed, they will go extinct, but fail to grasp the same thing is true of nations is beyond me.
Comments
You will notice I wasn’t trying to challenge his ideas. Does that mean I agree with them lock, stock, and barrel?
No. I’m very skeptical about a lot of them.
But as I stated above, before I agree or disagree with someone, I need to understand them. And the best way to understand someone is to ask questions, listen, and verify I’ve understood accurately. The worst way to understand is to start with an attack.
In this stage, the goal is not to trick someone. It’s not to convince them that they’ve contradicted themselves. It’s not to prove any point.
It’s to hear them out. And if there are things that don’t make sense, to ask questions of clarification.
But what do I think about his ideas?
Well, let’s look at them.
Scientific Inquiry
I have to agree with his idea that we should try to look at science dispassionately. I think it’s dumb to reject someone’s science simply because the results offend our sensibilities.
We reject science because there are issues with the data, or the experiments, or conclusions. We reject it because it doesn’t fit with the observations. Or because we can’t replicate the results, or because it fails to predict as it claimed it could. But we only hurt ourselves when we reject it because it doesn’t fit our current political beliefs.
Okay, fine. But what about his views on race and women?
The Rhetoric of Offense
Well, they’re bound to rile feathers. And Day sometimes seems to go out of his way to state them in a way he knows is offensive. I didn’t feel he did that with me. But if you read the links above, you can see he does employ it with others.
Here’s my take on this. The rhetoric of offense is different than the rhetoric of explication. The latter is meant to explain. The former’s goal is to cause injury. It has no interest in sharing ideas. It only has interest in injuring someone, either to try to gain relief from an attack or to beat someone into submission, or because seeing folks get all riled up provides amusement.
A good portion of Day’s posts that I’ve read, admitting it’s nowhere near exhaustive, seem to contain a lot of the rhetoric of offense. And I think this dramatically undermines his ability to get others to consider his ideas, let alone believe them.
Sure, the attacks might bring like-minded folks to his side. But, for the most part, it does not provide the ground in which insight grows. Offense closes both parties off to challenges, biases, and ideas. It closes them off to new information. And new information is such an integral part of learning.
Some people say that tone shouldn’t matter. For example, you may lace the fact that the earth revolves around the sun with expletives, or say it to me sweetly, but the fact remains that the earth revolves around the sun. So asking for a more respectful tone is an ad hominine attack, a logical fallacy. It has nothing to do with the argument.
But here’s where I believe the anti-tone folks go wrong. Offense changes the message. When you call me a jackass, you’ve selected to promote one message over another. It doesn’t matter if you’ve couched your attack in a well-reasoned point because you have decided to no longer communicate your point. You’ve decided to communicate the offense instead.
Can’t we do both?
Not really. It’s like playing a country western tune of reason softly in the background while shoving a 110 decibel speaker blasting an annoying alarm in my face.
It’s like taking the statement “the cow jumped over the moon” and saying “the the the the the the the the the the the the the the” followed by a barely audible statement of the rest. All the receiver hears is “the”. And that’s what they respond to.
This means there’s no fallacy at play because there is no argument being communicated. Instead, you’ve communicated an attack. And invited a response to precisely the same.
If the speaker wants someone to consider his ideas, then he needs to speak in a way that invites consideration. I know, you can do that, and the receiver may still go into what sometimes feels like “a hissy fit.” We see this all the time, don’t we? Communication is indeed a two-way street. However, if the guy who was trying to explain decides to switch and respond with an attack, that’s his choice. But don’t call it explication or reason or conversation.
Day was perfectly polite to me. And I know it’s incredibly difficult sometimes to not attack when being attacked. I know his ideas, even when stated reasonably, will rile some folks. But it’s also true that he sometimes loads his communications with things he knows will offend. Things meant to injure and ridicule. Things which show little regard for others. I find it counterproductive. I think it’s wrong. But I also condemn the same tactic from the other side. And, yes, there is probably a time to use the rhetoric of offense, but that’s for another post.
Okay, but what about his beliefs, John?
Votes for Women
Do you agree it would be better for our nation if women didn’t vote?
No.
I’m not convinced men aren’t affected by charisma. What? When males get in a group, all are equally popular? Or popular only because of their ideas, not their looks, money, power, physical prowess, etc? Nor am I convinced that women can’t be long-term thinkers. I haven’t seen any science that supports that idea. And my personal experience has been just the opposite. The women I know think a lot about the future. Furthermore, when I include women in councils, we usually come up with much better ideas.
Now Day might suggest there’s science to look at. That’s his prerogative. I’m incredibly skeptical. But I think the most productive thing to do in reaction to his claim is to gauge whether you think it merits serious consideration. If it does, or if you’re curious, examine the evidence and report your results. If it doesn’t, just say you haven’t seen anything to suggest its worth looking into further.
Education for Women
What about his idea that the most important thing for a society is to maintain the population, which means the most important thing for a woman is to have babies, and that education undermines this and therefore should be avoided?
In one way, he’s right. If you want to maintain a certain population, you do indeed have to breed.
But if that’s your goal, I don’t see education in general as the determining factor. Mormon women have, as a group, much more education than the average female in the United States AND they have more babies. Lots more. I don’t think it’s education per se. I think it’s the values and beliefs some education fosters.
Some data on Mormon education and family sizes: http://www.fairmormon.org/perspectives/publications/education-scholarship-and-mormonism and http://www.pewforum.org/2009/07/24/a-portrait-of-mormons-in-the-us/#4
Race and Intelligence
What about his ideas on race and IQ?
There are some groups that are taller on average than others, some that are shorter. On the face of it, I don’t see why some groups might not have a genetic disposition to more of one kind of intelligence and other groups less. I haven’t looked into this much. I don’t know anything about Homo sapiens sapiens, Homo neanderthalus, Homo denisova, and the various crosses.
However, I do question if IQ isn’t more about nutrition and early learning. I wonder if IQ tests really measure intelligence or just one type of problem solving. And I’m skeptical that it’s really that big of a difference. Maybe it is. I admit my ignorance and curiosity on this topic openly.
Race and National Success
What about his claim that Homo sapiens sapiens, which he claims are what we find in Sub-Saharan Africa ancestry, have more genes for violence than we do up north and so can’t at the present time build as successful a society?
This one makes no sense to me. I don’t see a difference in violence levels. Like the Romans weren’t violent? Or the Germanic tribes? Hitler and all those that followed him didn’t do violence? Napoleon and his armies? I don’t see how we selected against violence and short-term thinking. I’m incredibly skeptical of these claims.
Now, it could be he needed more space to lay them out. After all, I wasn’t asking for evidence or a full treatise. Only what he believed. But as it stands right now, I’m betting the types of violence he’s looking at are driven more by culture than anything else. And I don’t believe people are genetically predisposed against democracy.
Frankly, the ideas laid out in Guns, Germs, and Steel seem more predictive to me about what makes peoples successful than Homo crosses. But of course I’m always open to new information. However, even if this claim is true, it’s a fallacy to peg each member of a group to the average. People lie along a bell curve for all sorts of things, and it might be that any one person or community or even nation might actually have less of this than another from a different group.
Bottom line
Vox Day wasn’t the devil, dang it.
He is someone who espouses a couple of ideas that I agree with and a number that seem flat out wrong to me. He appears to be someone who enjoys the rhetoric of offense. I may investigate some of his claims. I may not. I am new to the topic of genetics, and am curious. Whatever I do, I found it useful to try to see for myself what the man believes. One thing that he and I agree on is how we should react to claims made with the purpose, not to offend and injure, but to expand our knowledge.
Now, I have no idea what types of comments this post will bring. Please note that I did not ask Day for his sources, or to lay out all the evidence he feels backs up these beliefs. That’s much too big for this post. You can certainly share your ideas and the science you find compelling. But this is my site, and by golly I request that if you post and want to express disagreement, that you disagree respectfully. Name calling, high-octane expletives, etc. will not fly here. Any post that fails to avoid this will be deleted. You can certainly try again, but if any prove unwilling to abide by this rule, I’ll simply block you to save myself some time.
I am much more interested in a discussion here than attack and offense.
The sad truth is men and women are politically manipulable in different ways. That’s why there are different ads directed at them. How very human of men to detect the way others are manipulated, but not how they themselves are. It lacks self-awareness. Utter folly will be the inevitable result. But I am interested in problems associated with all adults being allowed to vote in a representative voting process. The smallest representation pool is the family. It used to be that the household head or property owner would vote for the entire family. Now those votes are split.
You should go through the full logic, even if only in a thought story, for the positions you find so wrong or at least the ones you are skeptical with. Take multiple paths in your exploration.
Doing this will quickly show that few things in life are strictly binary.
One example would be the area of women’s suffrage. Look at the arguments at the time. Which proved accurate, those in favor or opposed? That would be one example.
I listened to part of the Federalist Papers recently and was not surprised to find that reality proved many things accurate (for and against). Do the same in other areas instead of just parroting modern PC thoughts.
I would bet you would find his books as compelling as any others if you would leave out predispositions.
His Throne of Bones series has a bit too much going on and it can take some time to wrap your head around it all, but it is a compelling world. The shorter stories have merit too.
I have not read his Science Fiction stuff, but I have read enough of his writing and the works of others to know that he is not the horrid writer some claim in a knee-jerk fashion.
I am fairly close (though not identical) to his philosophical views, but that is not a requirement to like his fiction. I am sure I disagree with the politics of many of the science fiction and fantasy writers I have read. I didn’t let that jump (for the most part) into the story so I could still enjoy it.
John,
One thing to explore is what really brings about more freedom. Is Democracy really as good as it is sold? Can you have freedom without voting?
Watch that you do not get stuck in modern cliches and instead examine what really is the best. Some conclusions may be quite unacceptable to those in power and harder to stand for publicly, but truth is truth and that is the best aim point.
Years ago I read that the PRI in Mexico, when it was the one and only political party, used to have a policy for dealing with a young radical firebrand cooking up trouble in the capital city. The party leaders would send the young firebrand off to be governor of a province.
The powers-that-be in SFF-dom could have done that with Vox Day. But they didn’t.
As Hong Hu Shi says, my comment was to Jake. I think that, overall, you did a commendable job with your interview. It is appreciated.
“Logic is an organized way of going wrong with confidence.”
What a stunning statement for a supposedly educated person to make.
Beale’s interactions with Jemisin are an excellent microcosm of his way of approaching things. IIRC, his first mention of her related to her claim that laws in the West are designed to kill young black men and another that when she stepped off a plane in Australia she immediately felt unsafe. He went after her with rhetoric as inflammatory as hers, albeit with substance, unlike hers.
One of Beale’s specialties is to merge substance-rich reasoning with offensive rhetoric, a marriage at which few are adept. Since most people lack this talent the responses he gets are usually rhetorically inflammatory but substance-free, which makes his interlocutor’s positions look idiotic.
It’s a fantastic tactic and one I have used since long before I encountered VP.
Well said, Tim. And another thanks for you, John.
That is a very astute point. Thanks for pointing it out.
You can’t actually mean what you just said with your first sentence, because it can’t even be logically defended. It is, at best, a humorous quote that would look good superimposed on a picture of Mark Twain.
Or are we to suppose that because logic “is an organized way of going wrong with confidence” that you either a) eschew logic entirely because it is fatally flawed, or b) go wrong with confidence in some disorganized fashion?
You could, of course, more logically state that it is eminently possible to begin with erroneous premises, thereby arrive at untenable logical conclusions, and proceed to point out where Beale has done so, but this would mean that you’d have to actually engage at the level of premise rather than conjecture, projection, and ad hominem.
Perhaps you are capable of such and just strategically chose the rhetoric of offense? If so, would that also make you a person who “presents as a troll for the ego boost”?
Food, as they say, for thought…
“But I think the most productive thing to do in reaction to his claim is to gauge whether you think it merits serious consideration. If it does, or if you’re curious, examine the evidence and report your results. If it doesn’t, just say you haven’t seen anything to suggest its worth looking into further.”
This has the unfortunate side effect of leaving unexamined anything of which you are sufficiently ignorant, however.
Of course, it’s impossible to suggest that everyone have enough specialized knowledge to react to every such question that is likely to cross their path. But it’s important to keep in mind that this epistemological approach only works if you are correctly able to identify the null hypothesis, and not get carried away with, “well everybody knows that…” fallacies.
“Vox is Aristotelian in temperament, choosing deduction over experimentation in many cases.”
That’s a curious thing to accuse the man of in the comment section of an interview where he advocated adopting universal direct democracy as an experiment.
I was actually surprised by how civil and accepting Vox’s site is compared to gay media when you do not follow the narrative. Simply posting on most gay sites that “Apple’s CEO should stop crying for a boy cot of a place that wont serve pizza and cheap booze at his wedding, until he stops gleefully engaging in commerce with nations that behead gays” will get you deleted & banned. The only thing I have been insulted for doing is owning a glock, the Barbie doll of hand guns.
The only gay media that covered a story, that lame stream media totally ignored, of a serial killer of gays in 3 states for religious reasons was GayPatriot. Mohammad Ali Brown (black moslem) was caught 2 weeks after the Ferguson Liquor store robber was killed by Officer Wilson.
so, on this whole ‘men getting their vote swayed by the hotness of the female candidate’ thing?
Madonna ( 56 ) just sexually assaulted Drake ( 28 ) at a concert.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fE56PD0dIvE
and, for her age, Madonna is smoking hot. i never really cared for her, but she’s thin, in shape, got long hair and a rack.
somebody want to explain to me again why ‘hot chicks’ are going to be a serious elective threat by distorting the male vote?
It should not matter. But politics is everything to Left… and to the Left everything is political. The Right tolerated this view for a long time. Recently however… in numerous ways… the Right has decided to play by some of the same rules.
The result… is… messy. Entertaining… but messy.
George Clooney put off marriage partially because he knew that his ability to make a bad movie that still have tons of gold diggers in the seats would be ruined by doing otherwise. You may argue about the size of the gold digger vote but not its existence. Those pushing for gay alimony are the gay gold diggers & gay divorce lawyers. Any BGLTQREADYFORHILliarY that pays more in taxes than it receives from the government knows feminists have so destroyed marriage its not worth getting. Career women and bottoms are both on the bad side of supply & demand so they will always want more government redistribution.
you think that’s bad, wait til you see Mad Mike frothing at the mouth about circumcision.
Please note that the warrior gene is oddly mislabeled. Anyone looking into it would give it the more appropriate name of “belligerent a-hole gene” as it give no benefit in fighting. The most liberal of liberal cities had queens crying when the San Francisco Gate published the demographics of bashings and other crimes. Blacks make up only 5% of SF but commit over 60% of SF crimes. PC queens clutched their pearls and cried on their fainting couches that revealing such data was worse than the actual crimes against gays.
SF is so liberal that they passed a law just to harasses a lawmakers ex boyfriend that had an arts & crafts workshop in his garage. SF cops also wont bother investigating any crime short of murder where both victim and criminal are participants in the victim category Olympics http://ij.org/in-san-francisco-it-s-illegal-to-store-your-own-stuff-in-your-own-garage
I did a graph of it once, and the conclusion was very straightforward: if you expect to have hot women in positions of power, then have a male king or prince and tell him he can marry whoever he wants, then you get good looking queen consorts: see Spain, Holland, England, and Jordan.
If you expect to have hot women elected into positions of power, you are going to do much worse. You’ll get the occasional Yulia Tymoshenko (didn’t work out to well for her) or Cristina Fernandez, but on the whole when the electorate favors a woman, looks* don’t factor into it – Angela Merkel, Nancy Pelosi, Hilary Clinton, Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir… nobody is going to say they rose to the top because men wanted to have sex with them.
* Though there does seem to be a correlation between holding political power and a minimum requisite BMI. Men don’t elect women to high office because they want to have sex with them, but they observably don’t elect the female equivalent of Howard Taft, either.
“When writing he lays deliberate traps. These traps are designed to make those people who skim until offended jump.”
Otherwise known as “trolling”.
I totally agree. It’s a badly-named gene. I was just reporting the facts!
Shocking stuff about San Francisco.
“The only way that Beale’s opinions are not anti-Libertarian is if you believe that those you are forcing by violence to not vote or have fewer rights (ostensibly women and Blacks) do not deserve individual liberty.”
These positions are not inherently anti-libertarian. He believes, for example, that in a representative democracy women shouldn’t have the right to vote because they favor security over liberty to a much greater extent than what men do. If libertarianism is about maximizing freedom in a given society and you know that a certain subset of the population is in favor less freedom and greater security then it logically follows that maximizing freedom means that subgroup shouldn’t be allowed to vote.
If limiting one freedom, women’s right to vote, leads to greater freedom for everyone, including women, then that is a good thing.
Because … Social justice
Actually, so-called “types of intelligence” a la Gardner have been largely discredited within the academic/ scholarly cognitive testing community. Every passing year, more and more evidence accumulates for a “G-factor” which underlies and unifies intelligence. You can verify this yourself by spending a bit of time reading the papers coming out of the field.
The cognitive testing community takes a VERY low profile because their findings are usually so upsetting to the popular narrative. I know a few professional cognitive testers and one of them explained it simply as “we know truths the public doesn’t want to know.”
One would need more than your simple assertion to define trolling as such…and, in fact, the jury (that is, definitions of trolling that can be easily found on the internet) would seem to disagree.
Trolling seems to equal “argument for its own sake” (that would be the loftiest possible definition). While what Vox is described as doing would be more like “refining the conversation by weeding out bad actors”. Those are hardly comparable.
Well said! I tried to make this point earlier but you’ve outdone me.
Your counterexample of Mormon women’s education vs. fecundity is a terrible control. Mormons believe deeply in the importance of family and have a long tradition of larger families AND emphasis on education.
Meh. Mormon’s emphasis on education is directly related to family formation. They send their young women to college to mix, mingle and eventually marry all the return missionaries. Mormon girls go to college at 18, while mormon boys don’t go until they finish their missions at age 20.
They are the last institution that basically still promotes the “Mrs. degree” plan for young women. Most Mormon women get married, drop out of college and start popping out babies before getting their 4 year degrees. Unlike secular society, Mormon culture promotes this and holds up motherhood and family as a sacred vocation, not Patriarchal oppression.
The rest of the country send their girls to college to get an education to focus on a career track and to MAYBE consider marriage and 1.2 children after the women have graduated and begun the climb up the corporate human resources ladder.
Since I have already been excommunicated from the Temple of the Bacon Eating GRINDR Rabbi for the heresy of noticing its not the STR8 White X-Tian Church Going Men that commit crimes against gays, I might as well take a swing at another Sacred Cow. I have had enough STR8 friends & co workers to know that STR8 men want prudes to be their wife , not sluts that pretend to be prudes. They might put a slut into an overpaid secretary position but not one that would have power over them. That’s how you can have a treasurer of a gay “charity” who has collection agencies looking for him due to personal debts.
Mr. Brown, my hat is off to you for engaging Vox Day in the manner you did. The shock is that you’re among the few who have.
The ironic thing is that the more his enemies paint him as some dark, evil, racist/misogynist/badthink flavor of the day, the more it works to his advantage. He mentioned Sun Tzu’s dictum about “know yourself and know your enemy” just last week. Those forays into the “rhetoric of offense”, as you put it, absolutely drive his detractors bonkers. They can’t think straight, and thus they continue to misunderstand, underestimate, and be outwitted by “the devil.” It gives him a tactical advantage, plus he enjoys it. You’d think these purportedly intelligent people would have figured that out by now, and yet they persist.
You, on the other hand, have showed uncommon good judgment and played above board. So I read your golem story, liked it, and bought Servant. If nothing else, your fair play got you a sale. (On the “visitor/reader/fan/Dread Ilk” scale, I’m probably a daily reader sliding toward fan. Sad Puppies, Rabid Puppies, and the resulting dust-up have given me all kinds of new things to read. Glad to add you to the list.)
VD has always responded in a consistent manner to the other person’s attitude.
not necessarily true. i’ve flagged him on multiple occasions for trolling. both me specifically ( he was telling me i was a retard because i was trying to ask why he was asserting that Fascism and National Socialism were completely different ideologies … he went radio silent after i called him out with Boxxxy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bMLrA_0O5I
) and the VP readership in general ( claimed that there are lots of blonde, light skinned Italians in Sicily and that the people get darker as you move north through the boot … you know, nearer to Austria. where lots of people have the surname ‘Tedeschi’ ).
but, yeah, you evade his trolling hooks and he’ll play pretty straight with you.
patrick kelly April 15, 2015 3:51 PM Mr. Brown apparently considers my following comments, still in moderation after others have been approved, to be “Name calling, high-octane expletives, etc. ”
**********************************
After he approved my first post the others went auto up. I could post yours but then he would know we are evaluating his disingenuousness. Actually posting it with a link to the taki mag “never trust anyone who has not been punched in the face” article might be good. http://takimag.com/article/never_trust_anyone_who_hasnt_been_punched_in_the_face/print#axzz3XPbfi0Fh
Actually I will just post like this to honor the standards of censorship.
Thanks for the interview.
I see you immediately got a lot of Vox Day defenders here.
I see a crank who supports incomplete theories that support his agenda, except when he doesn’t even rely on any data or theory but his gut.
That is a very astute way of describing it John. People who complain about Vox’s antics are short sighted in the sense that they don’t realize its actually a method of raising the level of discourse… not lowering it.
Look at some of the debates and discussions that have taken place at his blog. The place is absolutely fantastic when it is at its best.
Subjective, requiring clarification: “Our nation be better if women were not permitted to vote.” Clearer: “Our nation be more libertarian if women were not permitted to vote”. Yes, that is backed up by essentially all polls and surveys.
Does race correlate strongly with IQ? Does IQ correlate strongly with socioeconomic status? Yes, of course; this is hardly disputable. What policy implications does this have? If you are a libertarian, none. If you are a non-libertarian who believes that the _cause_ of the racial IQ gap is systematic oppression, there are serious policy implications. However there are excellent reasons to doubt the gap is caused by systemic oppression.
Finally, the reason race correlates with national success is because IQ correlates with race and countries tend to be racially homogeneous. Ranking countries based on average IQ gives essentially the same result as ranking them based on “success”, just as ranking races based on average IQ does the same.
Mostly stopped by out of curiosity. The interview provided an interesting look inside the thinking of a polarizing figure.
I don’t expect that it will change many minds…..
However, one point of contention is whether or not support for communism is/was extreme. It is extreme. It should signal something negative towards those who support it.
One hundred innocent civilians murdered by communist states in the 20th century ought to be sufficient to make a rational person to seek to distance themselves from such a bloody ideology.
And yes…I know that this drags things a bit off topic. But one of those things, was not like the others.
Regards…
No thought is off limits just because people will scream that only the evil ones think like that.
*facedesk*
WHY should a thought be ‘off limits’ just because some retard is going to throw a screaming temper tantrum?
you know, SF, which USED to be the genre of Dangerous Visions ( Ellison ) and ‘the literature of the taboo’ ( Aldiss, paraphrased ) has really gone off the road into the ditch.
” The only thing I have been insulted for doing is owning a glock, the Barbie doll of hand guns.”
But come on….that’s just begging for an insult.
We already knew the “if [keyword] then [shame]” trick. Good luck in your continuing encounters with facts and reality.
Bingo, alfanerd! I’ve been watching these various debates about controversial internet interaction, wondering when someone would put it in the proper historical perspective. You win!
The struggle for political, social and personal dominance over others, and the efforts to resist those who seek dominance have played out with all these behaviors throughout history. The only difference now is the amount of it we get to see, anonymously, from the comfort of home.
And in this case, familiarity certainly breeds contempt, for a lot of the common behaviors.
Just think of what Austria, Switzerland and southern Germany could have contributed to civilization advancements if only Iodine was added to salt before 1924. Goiters where common in Swiss and Bavaria.
Today they are trying to teach Africans how to make evaporative cooling pots like the tour guide in ancient Pompeii displays. George Washington was the richest man of his day & the proud owner of an ice cream maker. However GW got sick several times on bad water and ate less ice cream in his lifetime than someone on welfare eats by age 10.
I loved Harlan Ellison and his Dangerous Visions anthologies. Just maybe that is why I enjoy Vox Day even as he pisses me off. I’m a Christian yet a short story that tells of man hunting down God (his creator) because man is now more powerful than God. That was one of the best short stories I have ever read. And yes that is what SF should be dangerous and often offensive because of it.
Usually the most shocking things for STR8s about SF is the public sex or all the homeless. I might be a bit jaded but what did you find shocking the crime stats, that people would rather be victims then talk about crime stats or that liberals are petty busybodies? The SF cops are just doing what the Rotherham UK cops did ignoring little girl rapes by moslems to avoid being called names.
I don’t live there now but the only thing I found shocking about SF is how little time it took to prove me right about guys using smart meters to see when their exes are taking showers. http://thefreethoughtproject.com/california-governor-residents-face-fines-500-day-long-showers/ This link doesn’t carry water for the liberals.
No one can agree on what thoughts to forbid . You reminded me of an ex that thought liberty meant the right to have sex in public, but who called the cops after we broke up to tell them I add tri sodium phosphate to my laundry. It was removed from laundry/dishwashing detergents but you can still buy it in the hardware/ cleaning/ paint sections.
Which would you rather your neighbor enjoy public sex or nice looking clothes?
Surely this is testable: do women vote for the taller candidate to a greater extent than men vote for the taller candidate? If they do, how large is the difference — enough to have a significant impact on elections? I doubt it, but if anyone can point to contrary data I’d certainly be willing to look at it.
Logic is an organized way of going wrong with confidence.
Charles F. Kettering (1876-1958) American inventor, engineer
“Kettering’s Law,” from address before American Society of Mechanical Engineers (c. 1944)
Hey John
It will be interesting to see how much SJW pressure you get now. There have been several that have stopped by Brad’s place and insisted that he denounce Beale.
Its like they can’t figure out that Beale isn’t anyone’s responsibility but his own.
On another note, Mark Kloos and Balliet {sp?} turned down their nominations today.
No opinion on why that would happen.
Hey Steve
Tell Patrick I have these mats I want to talk to him about. He should remember the reference.
If only women had voted, Nixon would have won over Kennedy in 1960. I somehow doubt women were more sexually attracted to Nixon.
An attribute of Vox’s that often gets unnoticed… the man is extremely forgiving.
Say something horrible about him… threaten him… then later apologize for it… and he will simply forgive you and let by gones be by gones. I have seen this happen dozens of times over the last 15 years.
Figure that behavior into your calculations of the man.
The Devil doesn’t forgive.